Spinster: Making a Life of One's Own

In a quest to understand her desire for permanent singlehood and the professional and personal freedoms inherent in a fully self-reliant lifestyle, journalist Bolick weaves memoir, feminist theory, and biographies of five forgone writers into a riveting, essential text. She convenes this luminous “secret coven of dead spinsters”—Edna St. Vincent Millay, Neith Boyce, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Edith Wharton, and Maeve Brennan—and uses their radical last-century lives to explore the upside of not marrying.